Using bonus tools

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This video takes a look at the many bonus tools available for Maya. George shows how to find the Bonus Tools plugin and install them, and then goes on a brief tour of the most important bonus tools. He takes a look at the LayOut Tools Browser, which allows artist to manipulate objects easily.

- [George] Hi, I'm George Maestriand today we're going to take a look at Maya's bonus tools.If you're not familiar with themit's a great collection of toolsthat haven't quite made it into the full version of Mayabut Autodesk provides them to youand a lot of them are very, very useful.So, if you don't have bonus tools installed,you can go into the help menuand under Maya resources and toolsthere should be an option for download bonus toolsand that should bring up a browserthat gives you an overview of all the bonus toolsand then where you can download those.

So, in this case for my 2017,I click on this link for Maya App Exchangeand it brings up the Autodesk App Exchangeand allows me to download those tools.So, go ahead and download thoseaccording to the instructionsand install them if you haven't already.Now, the bonus tools install automaticallybut if you want you can go throughinto the plugin managerand scroll downand you'll see we have towards the very bottomMaya bonus tools.

In this case it's 2014 to 2017and then you want to make sure that you turn them onand load them to make sure that they are available to you.Now, once it's installed,you should have a bonus tools menu.Now, I'm going to go ahead and just tear this offand let's take a look at some of these.So, we've got a list of bonus toolsthat basically mimic our menu.So, we have edit, create, modify, display and window.We also have tools for modeling,UV editing, rigging, animation visual effects and renderingso under edit we have things such as duplicate on object.

For create we can create a digital number nodewhich is kind of cool.Modify, all sorts of really great modify tools.Display, we can do what's called a poly shell countwhich allows us to count how many shellsor different objects are in one polygonal object.We could do poly surface area.It will give you the area of a surface,so if I turn that onyou can see here poly area,so this particular object is 97.5,this one's only 72and again, I can turn that off by going here.

And then under display we have other optionssuch as the ability to adjust clipping planeson your camera.We also have a number of windows here.One of the nicest ones I findis called the layout tools browserand let's go ahead and take a look at that.So, I'm going to go ahead and select layout tools browser.What that does is it brings up this big window hereand it kind of docks itand in this case it's really restricting my real estate hereso I'm going to go ahead and left click on thisand tear it off so that I have a little bit more real estateand this gives me three separate tabs.

One is a browser which allows me to browseall of the objects in my particular project.We have a bunch of tools that allow usto transform objects.Now, some of these are just repeatsof the bonus tool set that are included,and so this is a great little interfaceinto some of those tools.One of these is basically a specific move tool,so if you want to move things specific amountsthen you can do that here.So, if I want to move five centimeters in X,I can do that and hit offset,one direction or the opposite direction.

Select two of these.We can move them five centimeters this way or that waywhich is kind of neatand we can also obviously change itby object or world spaceand we can use any axis we want.We have a very similar one here for rotate.So, if I select this object hereI can rotate along X,so I can do thator I can go back the other wayand again, we can rotate around world or local space.

And the same for scale.If you want to scale something a very specific amount,there's a very quick way to do it.Now, one of the neater ones here is random transform.So, this allows me to type in a numbersay from negative two to positive twoand I can select this object and just do a random move,so it will randomly move along those axes.If I have multiple objects selected,they can also randomly move.We also have options for rotate and scale,so if I want to randomly rotate these,I can do that as well.

I'm going to go ahead and hit control Z to undo that.Then we have other options here to transform pivots.We also have proportional transformswhich is kind of neatand then up here we have a snap align taband this allows us to align objects.We can also snap to pointsor to multiple pointsand then we can also align thingsto things such as bounding boxes and all that.So, these are some of the really cool little layout toolsthat are heart of the bonus tools.

Author

Updated

9/28/2017

Released

11/3/2016

Even 3D masters sometimes hit a wall with Maya. This weekly series is designed to give you tips, tricks, and techniques to solve the most common issues Maya artists encounter when using the program in a live production environment—and provide a dose of inspiration to kick-start your next creation. George Maestri shows how to use features like Camera Match and the Arnold renderer and create unique models and textures, such as rope and pulley assemblies and squashy/stretchy cartoon eyes. Tune in every Thursday for a new Maya trick to speed up your modeling, texturing, rendering, animation, or VFX workflow.

Skill Level Intermediate

7h 10m

Duration

55,976

Views

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